hich there is no
cultivation, there stands a series of chapels like those I have been
describing at Saas-Fee, only much larger and more ambitious. They
are twelve in number, including the church that crowns the series.
The figures they contain are of wood (so I was assured, but I did
not go inside the chapels): they are life-size, and in some chapels
there are as many as a dozen figures. I should think they belonged
to the later half of the eighteenth century, and here, one would
say, sculpture touches the ground; at least, it is not easy to see
how cheap exaggeration can sink an art more deeply. The only things
that at all pleased me were a smiling donkey and an ecstatic cow in
the Nativity chapel. Those who are not allured by the prospect of
seeing perhaps the very worst that can be done in its own line, need
not be at the pains of climbing up to Vispertimenen. Those, on the
other hand, who may find this sufficient inducement will not be
disappointed, and they will enjoy magnificent views of the Weisshorn
and the mountains near the Dom.

I have already referred to the triptych at Gliss. This is figured
in Wolf's work on Chamonix and the Canton Valais, but a larger and
clearer reproduction of such an extraordinary work is greatly to be
desired. The small wooden statues above the triptych, as also those
above its modern companion in the south transept, are not less
admirable than the triptych itself. I know of no other like work in
wood, and have no clue whatever as to who the author can have been
beyond the fact that the work is purely German and eminently
Holbeinesque in character.

I was told of some chapels at Rarogne, five or six miles lower down
the valley than Visp. I examined them, and found they had been
stripped of their figures. The few that remained satisfied me that
we have had no loss. Above Brieg there are two other like series of
chapels. I examined the higher and more promising of the two, but
found not one single figure left. I was told by my driver that the
other series, close to the Pont Napoleon on the Simplon road, had
been also stripped of its figures, and, there being a heavy storm at
the time, have taken his word for it that this was so.

Thought and Language {209}

Three well-known writers, Professor Max Muller, Professor Mivart,
and Mr. Alfred Russel Wallace, have lately maintained that though
the theory of descent with modification accounts for the development
of